At first I thought it was a teacher thing. I would ask how someone was doing and they would say, “I’m really busy.” This was often followed by a description of how little sleep they had gotten and how much grading they had done. Teachers weren’t whining. It wasn’t a “poor me” attitude. It was more of a sense of pride. As teachers, we often wear “busy” like a badge of honor, advertising to the world how out of control our careers have become.
When Mike Bloomberg, ex-mayor of New York, said he’d like to fire the lower-scoring half of the city’s teachers and give their students to the better-scoring half, doubling the size of their classes but paying them twice as much, he was affirming his belief in a particular theory of learning. For a short demonstration of…
Then, just to add to the confusion, management decided that we should have two student intakes: one in August/September (the traditional starting time for new students), and one in February. This meant that, if we were fast enough, we could trial the new curriculum on a small group of students that started in February, rather…
A business school in Paris will soon begin using artificial intelligence and facial analysis to determine whether students are paying attention in class. The software, called Nestor, will be used two online classes at the ESG business school beginning in September. LCA Learning, the company that created Nestor, presented the technology at an event at the United…
As an English teacher, I’ve had numerous conversations with college professors who lament the writing skills of their first year students. But not all writing. Most students are capable of solid expository writing. It’s their skill with persuasive writing that’s the problem. Specifically, they’re weak at writing a thesis statement that can be argued. I…
Designed for kids ages eight and up, the Educator Kit contains over 300 building blocks and 30 hours of educational STEAM curriculum to teach kids Scratch, an introductory programming language on the KOOV app to control the robots they build. There’s 23 different robots you can make using pre-coded “Robot Recipes”, which are jumping-off points…
Much of the public enthusiasm for STEM education rests on the assumption that these fields are rich in job opportunity. Some are, some aren’t. STEM is an expansive category, spanning many disciplines and occupations, from software engineers and data scientists to geologists, astronomers and physicists. What recent studies have made increasingly apparent is that the…
